


You Will Starve

by Silberias



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-15
Updated: 2016-01-17
Packaged: 2018-05-14 00:52:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,732
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5723413
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Silberias/pseuds/Silberias
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The shadow told Stannis that it would eat his happiness. </p><p>Stannis was fair sure that the demon would starve. </p><p>He was wrong.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Tommyginger](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tommyginger/gifts).



It had never left him after Renly's death. A shadow with his face, gaunt and harrowed by magic and death, and it sat always just next to Davos. His bastard, one that whispered to him at night that his quest was futile, that his happiness would be eaten just as Renly's heart had been. His hope, fragile as moonlight but as stern as Davos, to save Westeros was not happiness though and he continued on his chosen path relentlessly. The demon would starve, for hope was not happiness.

The shadow chose its battles carefully--taking Selyse one night after months of making her gasp for air between spells of terrible coughing. Stannis had wondered at the time, watching the shadow caress one hand down her cheek on her funeral pyre, if the creature thought they had been happy together. He did not of course see how his daughter withdrew into herself after her mother's death, and did not feel the warmth of her sweet life enough to notice when she absented herself from his day-to-day entirely. What Stannis did notice was that the creature seemed all the stronger when he looked to his right and saw Davos and Melisandre and never Shireen.

Happiness was not relief, either, for when he defeated the Others--taking their king's head himself--he collapsed and had to be carried from the battlefield by Davos and Devan. When he awoke the shadow seemed weaker than it had been in months, laying next to him in bed and seeming to fight for breath as it shivered. He felt nothing, so little that it mattered not who came to see him or tend him or give him news. Davos was the one who made the decision to head South, taking with them the strength of the North to retake King's Landing. It did not make him happy, only relieved.

They stopped at Riverrun, recently retaken by a miraculously-alive Brynden Tully with the help of his Arryn and Stark kin. Lord Robert Arryn scampered around as the old Blackfish's squire and Lady Sansa Stark were alive and well--and Shireen emerged from her long depression to sit with Lady Sansa, sewing with her and talking quietly of the war and those lost. Stannis, still drained and weak from the battles in the North, had no choice but to listen to them and dread the shadow that seemed to curl around him and watch those who he cared about.

Caring could be happiness and the shadow turned its formidable strength against Stannis himself for the first time. Not as it had Renly, with violent murder, nor as it had Selysse who it had taken slowly. This time it whispered in his ear of his struggles gaining the ear and attention of men. Of his only child being a trueborn girl, not even a bastard to speak of. That things would be easier with a son. It crooned little melodies in his ear that he heard Lady Sansa teach to his daughter. It turned the ugly churning of his stomach when he looked at Lady Sansa into something hot and desirous. It suggested, before he slept and just as he awoke and when he was training in the yard with some of the Valemen, that he needed her. He needed her smiles and her bloodline and her alliance. That it was a new world they lived in, that he was the King of Westeros and Beyond the Wall, and he would have his due.

Lord Brynden had been hesitant but the shadow seemed to steal Stannis' voice as they spoke of the match--how the union would unite the Realm and heal old wrongs. How he would see that those who harmed Lady Sansa would be punished accordingly. How she needed a husband who would not seek to take control of the North or Riverrun in their times of weakness. In the end, as the shadow threaded ghostly fingers through the old Tully's whitening hair, they had come to an agreement.

The shadow reminded him weeks later, as the crowd of well-wishers carried his bride into his room, that it would eat his happiness. Looking at his wife, afraid and slight, Stannis smirked for a spare moment. Her suffering tonight would not make him happy, her life as Queen would not make him _or_ her happy. And he watched, as the months went on, the demon faded in strength. The realm flourished and his marriage brought neither participant joy. The creature was nearly gone as, three years of dutiful beddings later, his wife swelled with a child.

Stannis' relief at the shadow's waning was short lived as he looked on in horror, the day after his son's birth, as the spirit with his face drew his dagger back with intent to kill Sansa. He barely set his son back into the cradle as he dashed between the shadow and his wife, crashing into her in his haste and finding himself unable to fend off the blade as it found him. It laughed and disbursed into mist, fading away entirely as Sansa screamed for their guards and for help.

The last he saw before he faded was Sansa weeping, the last he felt was her holding her hand against the wound, and the last he heard was his son's wailing. But the ghost was gone, and that was a good legacy to leave behind him.


	2. 16 Years Later

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Literally Stansa is malaria. I can be fine, go weeks without thinking about shipping it or writing it or anything. And then BAM. STANSA NAO my brain says.

The guards returned to her just after dawn after failing to apprehend the shadow that all had seen fleeing the royal apartments. The King was not yet dead, but from the frowns and mutters of the healers and maesters he was not likely to see noon. She held her newborn son and sat at the sidelines, stunned and shocked. They could not get the bleeding to stop, and Grand Maester Bodrin believed the blade had not only been poisoned but had hit a lung. The King was drowning slowly in his own blood and it was horrifying to listen to him wheeze in his breaths.

Soldiers had searched the Red Keep for most of the night for the assassin who had been wounded in the scuffle with the King and left a trail of blood behind him. Lord Davos had assured her hours ago that the man would be found and put to trial for regicide. Sansa had only been able to nod, made dumb with shock. For the first time in their marriage her husband had looked on her with happiness in his eyes. He had smiled so widely as he held his son. She had been so happy, elated that finally he might give her some regard and affection for having delivered to him his heir.

Now though she was asked to name a regent for her son, in case her husband did not survive. There had been no one else the King had trusted more than Lord Davos, but she could not name him for he had to serve as the Hand. Until the identity and loyalties of the assassin were learned she could not fully trust any of the other Lords Paramount save perhaps her uncle the Blackfish--and it was indeed the old Tully that she named as her son's regent. He was not the kind to order an assassination in the dark of night, she reasoned, and signed the letter that was quickly drafted for her. They would send it when the King died.

When her husband was given an hour to live she asked him be propped up just a little, laying their son on his chest and holding his limp hand on the child's back to steady him. She sat next to him, holding that hand on their child's back and grasping his other hand tightly, as he slipped away for good. Sansa knew when it happened, for the severity that had always been part of him seemed to seep from his features. Her husband was not the most handsome Baratheon, but that did not mean he was without his own beauty and she hoped that her son grew up in his image.

The guards had reported that the assassin was cornered at around dawn, dozens of soldiers and guards surrounding him as he menaced them with a stolen pike, but he crumbled to dust as soon as the sunlight touched him. All had said that the apparition had the face of Renly Baratheon, even when later questioned by the Faith they held true to their claim. Sansa herself, acting as Regent until her uncle arrived to King's Landing, had quietly grieved her husband's old use of blood magic. It had apparently come back to haunt him, to murder him.

Being the king's mother--she chose not to go down the route of Cersei Lannister by claiming herself Queen even after the ascension of a new King--Sansa kept a firm grip on how her son was raised. She knew his father had not believed in the Seven, but with little Rannard she took pains to educate in the religion. The Realm needed to believe that young King Rannard would not fall to his father's folly and dabble in magic--and the easiest way to convince them would be to have him grow up devout and holy.

She mourned his lack of siblings, remembering too well her cousin Robert Arryn, and chose orphan children from the street as his private playmates. They had no family connections, so no Great House felt favored above others, and without a family their motivations would not be clouded. When Rannard bullied one of his playmates, and the boy refused to associate with the eight year old king, Sansa had sided with the orphan. She personally saw to it that a small household was set up and paid for, complete with a maester and septa to see to the boy's continuing education.

"People are not toys, and if you abuse them they have every right to leave you or worse," she had told her son when he cried at the loss of his companion. He had sent an apology to the other boy but the child never returned to play with the King. Rannard had been conflicted, wanting to compel his playmate to come back, but in the end he had decided his mother was right and he moved on with his young life.

Eight years later it seemed too soon to officially crown her son when he came of age, the coronation ceremony taking place on the sixteenth anniversary of his father's death, but Sansa dutifully stood as Lady Baratheon next to him as the High Septon placed the crown on his black curls. After the applause she went to join her uncle, now an ancient old man compared to when she'd first known him as a girl, as King Rannard Baratheon accepted oaths of fealty from his Lords Paramount on behalf of their realms and vassals. The ghost that had killed King Stannis made no effort to appear at the feast and dancing that took up the rest of the day, and Sansa danced with a kind of lightness that hadn't overtaken her in many years. With her son made king by birth and now age she was free to pursue her own life--to marry, perhaps for love, or to travel the Seven Kingdoms or perhaps simply care for the Blackfish as he retreated into twilight.

What she did not expect was her son to creep into her rooms late that night and sit with her, his arms wrapped around her waist as he put his head in her lap. He had a healthy mop of Baratheon curls that she took a small delight in running her fingers through, and though Stannis' face was dim in her memory she was sure that this was how he had looked in his sixteenth year.

"Was Father a good king?"

Sansa hummed, concealing a sad smile by pursing her lips together.

"He did his best. The Realm trusted him to be direct, and they trusted him to do right by them. In those ways he was a good king. But he was not so open or kind as you are, and so had few friends. Lord Davos was the only person who knew him well, I think."

"But you were married three, almost four years--"

"Yes," she said, her fingers never stilling or hesitating as she combed them in her son's hair, "but he rarely spoke to me, and almost never in confidence. We married so he might have a son. It was not a marriage that was from a song, but that was another thing that made him a good king, I think."

She thought back, remembering how relaxed and calm he had been when he came to visit her the day after Rannard's birth. How his smile had been easy and happy for the first time she'd ever seen as he held the boy up to his chest and shared a breath with the infant child. His dark blue eyes had sparkled as he looked into the bright Tully blue ones of his son.

"He understood the point of duty, the spirit of it as well as the letter. Our marriage was to produce an heir for the Kingdom, he did not attempt to trick me that it was anything else. I was lonely, very lonely, but he treated me well. I have attempted to teach you his way, such as I knew it, as well as temper it with mine."

"My wife will never feel that way, I'll love her, I'll love her as much as Lord Davos loves Lady Marya." Sansa laughed and patted his chest, feeling his heartbeat. He was still her boy, just barely sixteen, and it was good to see flickers of that still despite his onslaught of responsibilities. 

"Even if Lord Davos made you marry Rivanna Arryn?" Rannard scowled something fierce then and Sansa laughed even more merrily. Rivanna Arryn, daughter of a homely Tarly girl and Sansa's cousin Robert, was by all accounts abrasive and preferred the friendship of dogs and horses to people. Her twin brother and Robert's heir, Olwin, was gentle and sweet according to many but well able to handle his sister's outbursts.

"It is not our whole choice of who we wed, my son," she said when she composed herself, "but it is our whole choice of how we act afterwards. Your uncle, King Robert, saw whores despite his wife who quickened with child only months after their marriage. Your father did not demand my time any more than he required and did not fetter my life or pursuits more than duty asked him to. Lady Rivanna is a good match, but so is Princess Aelyn Martell, your sister's niece. Many such ladies will come to spend time at court in the coming moons, each hoping you will pick her above the others."

They sat in silence for a while after that, the very distant sounds of the city continuing to celebrate her son's coronation. The efforts of the Small Council had preserved the Realm and seen it prosper, even Flea Bottom was becoming less of a stinking pit.

"They are all dutiful ladies," she murmured, "like I was for your father. Whatever one you decide on will understand if you give her the time King Stannis gave me, but I believe you have it in you to be happier in marriage than us."

Her words seemed to relieve some of his doubts, and Rannard asked her no more difficult questions that night. He was more than her son the next day, he was the Protector of the Realm, King of Westeros. His eyes, bright blue beneath his black curls, took on an age that was beyond his years and something about him riveted his vassals to the spot when he put questions or tasks to them. Sansa didn't ache for his father though, for she knew that Stannis would never have seen this change in his child or known to celebrate it. Instead she was joyful that the world her husband had sewn together with bare and bloody hands had held, that it now had a proper keeper. She hoped it gave him peace in whatever heaven he'd been sent to for saving his wife and child from his own curse.


End file.
